Maintaining Appearances
by teremala
Summary: Wars hurt in ways no one wants to talk about but, with all of the Animorphs out of the picture, no one has to.


I'm crouched outside the mathematics building with a cup of coffee and a laptop. It's cold here in the shade and the wind keeps blowing my hair into my face, but the sun is too much for the laptop's display, so here I'll stay.

I'm failing my classes miserably. When I write that like this, it's easier to say, because I can pretend that I'm just a character in my head and that it doesn't affect me. Me, failing? Never. Because, in my mind, I'm not doing that badly – I do have a basic grasp of the concepts, and can toss around jargon with the best of my classmates. They have no idea that I'm failing, because I'd never tell them. And, God knows, I've lied to my parents enough to be able to slip something like this past them with ease. Even my professors don't have the slightest idea how bad my grades are, because they don't know my name or my face, just a number. The one class I have where I am known, where I can be a distinct entity, I'm doing reasonably well in. It helps that the class is basically review for me and I can, therefore, whip out the assignments quite easily. I don't study for it, though, and therein lies another trap: I get bored.

When I was younger, they called me smart. Gifted. But then kids like me were used to come up with sociological theories about how gifted kids get bored and then fail. It's a stupid theory, because those same gifted kids are perfectly capable of looking something like that up and seeing it as complete justification for all they've ever not been good at, and thus propagate said theory. I try to be more honest with myself than that: I'm failing because I haven't bothered.

I attend classes sporadically at best. I don't do the assigned work. I've basically given up on this semester. Already I've prepared my speech for my advisor: tough classes, a new city, too much stress. It will be a good scene, one that will no doubt repeat itself in his office a hundred times in the coming weeks. It doesn't matter that it's not true. And then next semester I'll take easy classes, so I can get off of academic probation – which I will no doubt be on by that point – and I'll be bored with them, like I'm bored with my Spanish class, but at least I won't be failing. And then maybe the semester after that, I'll start back in with the hard classes, or, hell, maybe I'll take one hard class next semester, or maybe I'll drop out…I don't know. I really don't know. I don't think it much matters.

I look at this all and despair. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm used to being the best at everything, or at least pretty damned good, and it kind of hurts that, now, when I try to do that, I start to fall apart. I have two conflicting thoughts: one is, that I _should_ be able to do everything, and the other is that I physically _cannot_. I think I regard myself as weak for not being able to work sixty hours a week and have a full credit load and have friends – all while having what feels like a nervous breakdown, of course. I think I still half expect that, one of these post-midterms days, I will haul myself up and magically recover enough to at least get a B. Since I've failed every single test thus far, though, that doesn't seem particularly likely. And part of me thinks that that's a good thing, because it will force me to accept that what I'm trying to do is impossible and just move on.

And what am I trying to do? I'm trying to be normal. I'm trying to fit in. I am desperate for acceptance, but seem to have forgotten how to find it. When I was young – and here we go with the "the good old days" shit again – I knew how to make people like me. Now…they like me well enough, I guess, but I'm a few steps removed. They like me the way they like the TA who gives us candy during class: I make our forced interactions more bearable by being pleasant.

I'm procrastinating, writing this. I skipped my organic chemistry class this morning, am skipping my vaunted Spanish now. I told myself I'd type up the assignment and e-mail to the professor, but I'm not making much progress on that, am I? I have a Calc discussion in half an hour, and I haven't done the homework. I told myself I'd do it during class, but to do that, I'd have to get the Spanish done first. And I probably won't. The whole concept of me taking Calculus is ludicrous.

I never make progress, but I do a good job of simulating it. All of this typing, on this laptop that I borrowed from the language center so I could work outside, looks so productive. At work, people think I'm productive – it's a dumb job with a stupid corporation, but it's money, and that comes in handy. Kind of. I don't spend any of it, except to pay rent and tuition. I'm just not interested in spending it and, when I do, I feel vaguely guilty. I bought some food last night, mac and cheese and baked beans. And some milk. It was about eight bucks. I'll eat that shit for the next three days, that and too-strong coffee. I woke up this morning feeling kind of sick, but that doesn't matter. Being sick to my stomach is really the least of my problems and, hell, it was another excuse to procrastinate and lie around in bed reading weird sci-fi novels.

I remember a time when I didn't have to read science fiction books. I remember when my life _was_ sci-fi, and I didn't dare sleep in.

. 

There's a bug on my computer. It's brown. It has six legs and two little antennae and a proboscis. I think it's one of those bugs that was bright green in the summer, but I really don't know – do bugs change like that, green to brown, following the seasons? Or do they just die?

I could find out, you know. Sometimes I think about that, how easy it would be to pick a stupid question like that and answer it by experiencing it. The little brown bug is on my hand, now. I can see that it doesn't really have a proboscis, but more of a massively stunted head. Can it see? I could spend the next hour on the Internet trying to figure that out – and, believe me, I've wasted more time, on more mundane subjects – or I could sit quietly for a minute with that little brown bug on my skin, and then find out for myself.

You probably think I'm nuts, by now. I'm depressed, obviously, but I'm not doing a damned thing about it. I muse about insects. I sit in the cold wind while my hair whips around my head and I wonder what it'd be like to be a little green bug that changes into a little brown bug. If it does. I buy coffee by the carafe-full, don't do my homework, and occasionally go to class to fail a quiz in-person instead of just taking the zero. The only thing I put any effort into is work, because it's easy enough without being too boring, and because certain people would have wanted me to do it. Certain people I cared about very much, and then watched go off to die.

That's really what I want to talk about, but I'm playing it cool, being vague. I can admit that I loved them, but I won't tell you why. But, then, that's probably why the other people in my classes – I want to call them kids, but we really aren't kids anymore, are we? – why my _classmates _don't much like me. I won't tell them what my problems are, but I can't pretend that they don't exist. And though I might well daydream of one day walking away from them in disgust, throwing my backpack on the ground, and then leaping off the edge of something tall only to come soaring back up as an osprey, an eagle, a hawk…I don't. Because then I'd be Marco the Animorph again, and being that Marco pretty much sucked.  
.

Do you remember, when the world found out about us? The government knew first, of course, but then Jake and Ax – oh, man, the Ax-man played that so well - got through to that War Prince and suddenly we had our first interstellar treaty. And that made news. Rachel was gone, all of those poor kids had been blasted away, Jake was a ragged shell of himself, Tobias had flown off to God-knows-where, Cassie wouldn't talk to us, Erik felt betrayed…but the show had to go on. And so I got up and grinned at the cameras, feeling scrawny and stupid in my spandex morphing suit. I grinned and lied through my teeth. I answered all of their questions without saying a goddamned thing. I was the spokesman, and they loved me.

The others felt betrayed, of course. Grateful that I was dealing with the media, but irritated that I had moved on so quickly. They had no idea. I couldn't let them know. I had to be the sane one, the shining example to prove that life could go on. I didn't even bother trying to get through to Tobias – I knew only too well what he felt, and that I would only make things worse – but I thought that Cassie for sure, and Jake, and maybe even Ax had a chance.

I was wrong, wasn't I?

Cassie was my first mistake, but, after that, there was no recovering. I trusted her when she said she was alright because I needed a companion so badly. We worked together to help Jake remember how a functioning human being was supposed to act. The whole time, I kept looking at him and feeling jealous – he could mourn, he could collapse and hide himself in an aloof demeanor and an icy stare, but I had to get up every day and _cope_. I hated Jake, for a while, and that was what Cassie used to convince me. She had moved past Jake, she said, whereas I was still all caught up in love and admiration and despair.

I knew about the plan to rescue Ax almost from the beginning. Jake was doing alright by then, but he still wasn't exactly human. He organized, he coordinated, he gave orders, but all of that was automatic. His brain saw problems and spit out answers and, for the military, that was perfectly fine. But it scared me. It scared me because I knew why Jake had been our leader: he was our leader because he cared. He was never the smartest or the strongest or the most talented, but he was willing to dedicate himself to us, to give us all he had and then take the blame when things didn't work out.

But Jake killed some part of himself, bringing us through that war and, as much as I loved him and admired him, I knew that saving Ax wasn't going to be about good plans and cold decisions. It was going to be about improvising and finding every possible advantage, and yet still being ready to sacrifice everything to save the team. And I didn't trust Jake to do that, not anymore. I didn't even trust me.

So I went to Cassie. I told her about Ax, about everything I was thinking. I let her see how profoundly scarred I was, how much it hurt just to get up every morning and put on a brave face. I told her I trusted her. Then she took my hand and everything was very still for a minute. She smiled at me finally and started talking about the Hork-Bajir. Who they were, what they needed. Why they mattered. She told me things I already knew, about Ket and Jara and their daughter Toby. She told me things I didn't know, about the colonies she had founded, the work she was doing. And then she took my hands again and asked if I understood. Even as I nodded, her eyelids drooped closed, and I felt that tingling sensation I had not felt since the last battle: the feeling of another creature's DNA being assimilated into my body, encapsulated in my blood for my later use.

And so Cassie became me, and I became Cassie. The day Jake came to tell her that he was leaving, it was me standing there. It was me who went back to Rodney and told him a heavily edited version of the story that had me – Cassie – still desperately in love with Jake and heart-broken to see him leave. It was perhaps a bit over-the-top, but Rodney bought it. We walked back to the camp together, a careful distance apart. I demorphed and slept alone in our tent. That evening, when I was Cassie again, Rodney tried to talk to me, but I just shook my head and walked away. I never saw him, or Cassie, again.

I don't know if Cassie had as easy a time of it with Jake and Tobias. Maybe. I was glad that I didn't have to try to fool any of our friends, in any case. She might have pulled it off, but I never could have: that was why I had cut ties with Rodney so quickly. In any case, Jake and Tobias were both too messed up to indulge in any serious interrogation, and any changes in my personality were probably written off to the war, or the casual way I was supposedly shrugging said war off. And then they were off into the stars, and the only thing Cassie had to worry about was demorphing every two hours.

Not that that's so hard – I did it for almost a year, with no one the wiser. Demorphing is a lot easier when one of your forms doesn't have wings, or claws, or four hooves and a killer tail. Sometimes, I didn't even bother finding somewhere private: I just slipped off into a darker corner so the change in skin color wouldn't be so apparent, and did my thing. Cassie wasn't exactly known for her stunning wardrobe, so it was never a problem to wear long, concealing clothes, and things got even easier when it occurred to me to wear our hair similarly, so I didn't have to explain sudden locks sprouting out of my head. I turned Cassie into something of a recluse, I guess, but, given her history and the sudden departure of all of her friends, no one found that very remarkable.

After about a year and a half with no word from any of the others - except Erik, who knew what I was doing and disapproved in a silent, brooding way that reminded me of Jake at his most adult – I began to phase Cassie out. It sounds horrible when I say it that way, but I was tired of the game, and thought I could function better if I wasn't trying to be an eighteen-year-old girl in charge of an alien preserve. I considered recruiting the Chee to play Cassie's part for me – certainly, they'd have done better in her vet classes than I did – but they were tired of us. We'd saved our own planet be doing what they never could on theirs, and now we – I – disgusted them.

So Cassie-who-was-not wandered out into the woods one day and never came back, and, some time after, a rather generic kid named Marco Anderson – don't ask me why I picked _that_ name – enrolled in a state university on the other side of the country, where snow fell astonishingly often and the people thought of the Yeerks as some crazy Californian thing.  
.

For a brief time, I was happy. The crisp air didn't remind me of anything at all. The leaves turned brown and red and gold and fell and I never thought of Ax in his forest scoop. Snow covered the ground and I had a brief flash of the six of us, huddled together in a cave at the top of the world with wolves and whales and aliens with antifreeze for blood chasing us, but then the storm passed and I realized I could still see trees, and smoke coming from chimneys, and smell the McDonald's down the street, and so the image of me nestled on Rachel's furry back with my pincers buried in bear flesh fled.

I don't know quite when that changed. I tried so hard, that first semester, to be normal. I joked around – not too much, because someone had made an off-handed comment about the old Marco, Marco the Funny One, that hit too close to home - but enough that people should have liked me. And I guess they kind of did, but I didn't much like them. They were all so young and innocent. They'd rant about politics and how they were going to change the world. They wanted to study abroad, to experience life. They'd talk about their classes, their majors, their dreams. I didn't have a major, and my dreams were better described as nightmares. I'd had enough of life.

Bitter regrets and painful memories don't really fit in well on a college campus. You're supposed to either be dedicated to your studies or a complete goof-off, and I was neither. I didn't get drunk with the people in my dorm because it was way too easy to imagine never being sober again. But when I tried to focus on my classes, I'd remember lying in the hayloft with Jake, scribbling answers to algebra homework, or swapping history notes with Cassie in exchange for help in biology. They'd been my family, and the war had taken that away, but no one seemed to care. By the time the world knew about the Yeerks, we'd taken care of them. By the time the world got tired of cheering its young heroes, we'd all conveniently disappeared.

.  
.

* * *

A/N: To everyone who has been poking me about Caecus (all three of you!), thank you very much for your interest. I promise to get back to it, because the initial question still intrigues me, but, right now, I'm doin' the school thing (albeit with more success than poor Marco) and that has to have priority. Don't ask how spitting out a random chapter that promises to be the start of an entirely different kind of story fits into that, though, because I really don't know. ;) 


End file.
